Dick Houtman's principal research interest is cultural change in the West since the 1960s, particularly the emergence of a new political culture in which cultural rather than class issues are central, processes of religious purification and revitalization, and, more generally, the Romantic quest for authenticity. As a cultural sociologist, he aims to expose intellectual pretensions of 'true' meaning, solidly grounded beyond culture and history, as moral discourse disguised as science.

Dick Houtman considers himself neither a social or cultural theorist, nor a methodologist, but firmly believes that the cross-fertilization of theoretical ideas and empirical research provides the only feasible road to socially relevant and theoretically meaningful sociological knowledge. As to teaching in higher education, his philosophy is simple enough: students should not be made to reproduce other people’s ideas, but trained to think for themselves and conduct empirical research.